Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Some Penguin Classics celebrate awkward anniversaries, and in the literary world, it looks like no anniversary this side of the publication of Mein Kampf will ever be more awkward than that of Rudyard Kipling, born 150 years ago, whose incredible body of work has been simplified and then vilified under the “Empire jingo” tag for […]
Read MoreThe firebrand preacher and founder of the Presbyterian denomination is the subject of a masterful new biography
Read MoreWhen a renegade mage steals a powerful book of sorcery, the world of Marc Turner's fantasy debut is plunged into a disturbing new form of warfare
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are just eye-openingly beautiful, extravagantly so in the case of the recent hardcover Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, the first English translation of a medieval Arabic work called the Hikayat, the manuscript of which was found by a German Arabic scholar in a library in Istanbul and published […]
Read MoreA former British White House correspondent looks back half a century at the two titans who ruled a now-vanished Washington
Read MoreReligion and science - the so-called "non-overlapping magisteria" - are actually deeply adversarial, writes "Why Evolution is True" author Jerry Coyne
Read MoreThere was never any real doubt that I would return to The New Republic even in what Penny Press historians will refer to as the Post-Chotiner Period. After all, the magazine still has an ample Books section, and even though that section is now run by a couple of guys who did themselves no PR […]
Read MoreCharles Boxer and Mercy Danquah are both kidnap specialists who've solved many tough cases. But in their latest, the missing person is their own daughter - and she doesn't want to be found
Read MoreThe US Constitution - the oldest in the world - gets a comprehensive new biography
Read MoreTwo men meet by chance in a 1960s cafe - and remember a time twenty years earlier when they were captor and prisoner at Auschwitz
Read MoreIs the artist painting heath landscapes in England during World War II a mild-mannered hero of military campaigns or a spy? Gerard Woodward's spellbinding novel starts there and then travels over the whole of an improbable life story
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics break with tradition, almost always to excellent effect. Of course the foremost tradition we all associate with Penguin Classics is the durable, curiously dignified paperback reprints that have been the backbone of the publishing house for well over half a century, and Penguin still produces those in abundance, the finest reprint line […]
Read MoreThe Tim Parks essays collected in this pretty volume range over the whole landscape of the book-world, from endangered copyright to foreign-lit chic to the inescapability of Jonathan Franzen
Read MoreIn the latest Star Wars novel, Darth Vader and his evil Emperor are trapped on a hostile world, being hunted by man and beast
Read MoreRenowned classicist and historian Peter Green has at last produced a translation of the Iliad - and it comes with its own Greek Chorus. Steve Donoghue investigates.
Read MoreMax Planck, the great physicist and father of quantum theory, gets a marvelous and empathetic new biography
Read MoreA new biography takes advantage of recently-opened Soviet archives
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted here at Stevereads a few times in the past, take on a life of their own as translations even when the larger currents of social understanding and the craft of translation have moved on. I was reminded of this just the other day when I encountered a slightly battered […]
Read MoreIn the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States summarily imprisoned thousands of its Japanese citizens for the duration of the war. Richard Reeves' passionate new book tells the story
Read MoreOur book today is The Doll Maker by Richard Montanari (from Mulholland Books), that author’s eight installment in his series of police procedurals set among the mean streets of present-day Philadelphia and starring grizzled police detective Kevin Byrne and his younger, smarter partner Jessica Balzano. This latest adventure opens in a typically gripping fashion, with […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.